


But Not Broken

by Umbralpilot



Series: Guardiansverse shorts [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood and Violence, Class Issues, Corporal Punishment, Flogging, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Military, Revolutionaries, Whipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-19 01:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22869823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot
Summary: A mutineer is punished; an officer's life is forever changed.
Series: Guardiansverse shorts [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643962
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	But Not Broken

**Author's Note:**

> This ficlet takes place in the same world as longer works [Ghosts of the Borderland](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17771978/chapters/41934752) and [The Soldier's Apprentice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22517767/chapters/53807785), but can be read as a standalone. 
> 
> idk what I love writing more, floggings or speeches.

The agitator was older than Ander had expected, though not very much so: thirty, perhaps, or a little younger, but either way older than a man ought to be and still put stock in revolutions.

They chained him at the centre of the camp, on his knees with arms held up and spread wide. Ander ordered his soldiers into orderly ranks to watch: careful, attentive to which of his commanders stood close to which, watching the faces of the men behind them for their response. It had become ritual. They'd caught half a dozen so-called revolutionaries in the last month. Caught, chained, and publicly punished, as though trying to beat the popular unrest out of the flesh of the simmering country But this one, the brigadier had promised Ander, this one was going to be something special. Once this one was broken, that would be the end of it.

"You could do it yourself," the brigadier had offered, and Ander had considered it, but turned him down politely. "Ah, that's quite all right. I know many fine officers who prefer to watch."

Ander had spent much of that morning trying to forget, or tell himself he had imagined the queer shine of the brigadier's eye saying those words. What rumours the brigadier had heard about him - an inheritance discarded, an ancestral home abandoned, no wife nor even a bastard heir for either - those were the man's own problem. Ander did his duty. 

It protected him well enough. 

Watching was his duty. They'd torn the uniform shirt off the agitator before forcing him to kneel, but they had left its tattered collar to hang about his neck in mockery. He was barefoot. And already scarred: three gouged bullet scars in his back, a sickly pink in the copper-brown skin. His long hair was loose, and the brigadier grabbed it to pull his head back and show his bruised face to the soldiers. The man did not resist, but fixed his gaze into any man he was turned to look at. He was, Ander thought despite himself, handsome in a naked-steel way: the kind of beauty that took to being bloodied.

"You will want to look at his back," the brigadier was saying. "But it's his face that you must remember, when he screams and cries. That is the face of your joke of a revolution. Say your name and your crime, dog."

But when the agitator did speak, his voice was like a calm thunder: "My name is Festus Detrich, and you will not live to see the end of my revolution."

The brigadier, Ander was certain, had not heard the man speak before; he gave a minute twitch of barely hidden shock, and the gesture sent a ripple through the ranks. Ander thought to send a warning glance back to his commanders, but his gaze remained pinned and waiting. That handsome defiance would be broken soon. The world was full of beautiful and pure things broken under a whip.

The brigadier held up the whip for the ranks to see. "This dog stands accused of mutiny, agitation, and conspiracy against the throne," he announced. "Before, there would've been a trial, and a number of lashes set. But the Kaiser's mercy is finite. He'll taste the whip until he repents, or until he dies."

Ander looked at the set of Detrich's fine shoulders even in his chains, at the hard muscles in his throat, and thought: _It's to be an execution, then._

Knowing that, he expected silence when the first strike of the whip bit across Detrich's back, across the old scars, when the brigadier called out, "one, as an introduction to the art." But Detrich let out a loud exhale, rasping, less in pain than in expectation finally met. _He'd been flogged before,_ Ander realized, and, _He remembered it being worse._ But the brigadier called out "two!" and crossed the first welt with a second, then briskly counted up to five, seven, nine, businesslike as a man working up to a rhythm. Every time Detrich bit off the end of a grunt, breath shuddering, licking open lips between blows. The clenching of his body with every strike made his chains rattle.

"Ten!" the brigadier announced. "Speak your guilt, dog."

"Guilt before whom?" Detrich panted. "I don't recognize your Kaiser or your right - _gah!_ "

The brigadier had come around to stand before him as he spoke. The whip whistled across Detrich's chest, one cord striking and tearing at his cheekbone.

"For insolence," the brigadier said calmly. Ander did glance back now, seeing the nauseated looks he expected among the soldiers. He doubted any of them had seen a man take the Cat to the face before. "Don't let it repeat, or I'll take an eye. Or a nipple."

"To keep?" Detrich aked, and something ran through the ranks, and one corner of his mouth turned up, and the brigadier flushed an ugly crimson and struck from the other side, making that proud mouth fill with blood. Then he was at Detrich's back again.

"Eleven! Twelve! Speak of your guilt!"

"Speak of your slavery!"

"Thirteen! You are a traitor to crown and country!"

"And you - _argh!_ You are a traitor to the people!"

"Fourteen! Fifteen!" The brigadier swung his arm high. The old scar tissue split, and Detrich arched in his chains with a hideous cry as blood burst into the simmering air. "I know of you," the brigadier said, breathing heavily in the pregnant pause. "We all do. You gained those scars in your first battle. In honour. It's right that I unmake them in shame."

The whip bit again, keening through the air, deeper into the ruined flesh. Ander heard the man closest to him waver between prayer and curse. The brigadier reached twenty, and Detrich grabbed the chains and pulled, straining through the agony, blood dripping from his hanging hair. Thirty, and the brigadier paused again to shove the hard tip of the whip into the arc it had carved through one scar. 

"You think this is bad?!" he roared at the soldiers who cringed when the touch made Detrich choke on a sob of pain. "A real man of real birth takes fifty in silence! Eighty! A hundred! This one's nothing, hinterland scum, a feeble peasant pretending to be an officer! A cur biting the hand of his master! Speak your guilt!"

"That is my guilt!" Detrich burst out, twisting at his chains, head thrown back and eyes all blue fire. "I stand guilty of wrong birth! Guilty of my mother and father! Of working the land - my land - harder, you slave!" he howled when the brigadier's whip slashed across his body again. "Harder! Show what you lot do to farmers dreaming only of freedom!"

"You are a traitor!"

"I am your brother!" Detrich shouted, writhing under the whip, shouted to the soldiers watching, drowning out the brigadier's count. "The same whip breaks us all! We work! We starve! We fight his wars! He takes honour, and we take scars and lifetimes of pain!" The brigadier had given up on counting by then. He swung his instrument, and swung, breathless with fury and blind, and Detrich spoke between screams. "Brothers, we are guilty! Guilty of our hunger! Guilty of our hopes! Guilty of - bowing to the whip - and not realizing - _we hold the guns._ "

The brigadier froze. Every breath in the camp froze.

Ander didn't look back. He didn't need to. He already knew: every lowborn soldier in the ranks, and nine of ten soldiers were lowborn, every one of them was looking at his gun.

And later - much later, years and decades later - he would wonder when a man was truly old enough to stop thinking much of revolutions, or justice, or to have the fleeting dream that beauty could be bashed and brutalized and yet not broken. For now, his hand, his arm moved almost on its own. Taking his gun from its holster. Seeing, from the corner of his eye, his pale, wide-eyed second do the same, and man after man in the ranks join them. Realizing, as he raised the barrel to point at the staring brigadier's face, that Detrich was looking at him with open, glorious shock. And joy. A joy that seared the doubt from him and left only its own glowing brand.

"Enough," he said to the brigadier, wondering how his own eyes shone. "This man goes free."


End file.
